Submitted photoCamp Hill native John Foy, who has worked on "Fear Factor," "Big Brother" and other reality TV shows, has returned to Pennsylvania to develop more shows for ShootersTV in Philadelphia.

He’s not a fan of the pre-scripting and other fictionalized contrivances that have found their way into hit reality shows such as “The Hills” and “Blind Date.” If reality gets a little too dull, some desperate producers are willing to tweak it through techniques like “Frankenbiting,” in which audio is dubbed to create a false impression of what’s being said.

“You will always get something more real if you just set up the scenes and let the cameras roll,” the Camp Hill native said. “Truth is always stranger than fiction. The easy way is to say, ‘Go stand over there and get in a fight.’ ”

Now, the Cedar Cliff High School and Temple University graduate has moved back east to take a job as senior vice president and chief visionary for ShootersTV, a Philadelphia-based company that develops reality and other nonscripted television programs.

“We are lucky to find someone with John’s credentials,” said Ray Carballada, president of Shooters. “John’s career is incredibly impressive.”

For his part, the father of two said, “The opportunity to bring my family back home to Pennsylvania was too good to pass up.”

The professional challenge was tantalizing as well, as Foy and his Shooters colleagues try to read the reality tea leaves. One trend that is likely to continue, Foy believes, is that shows will become more and more specialized.

“A lot of networks and cable channels are very niched in what their programming is now,” he said.

There are signs of a cool-down, though. Even “American Idol,” the gold standard for reality television, suffered from lower ratings this past season.

Reality shows have always been a part of television, which featured a lot of live programming in its early days. Shows from the 1950s such as “The Ted Mack Amateur Hour” and “Candid Camera” were the direct forerunners of current shows such as “American Idol” and “When Vacations Attack.”

Other long-standing members of TV’s reality mix are awards shows, documentaries and even the nightly news.

But the modern concept of “reality television” is often traced back to 1992, when MTV launched an experimental show called “The Real World,” in which young people from diverse backgrounds were thrown together in a house and then filmed round the clock.

It was a hit, especially among that sought-after youth demographic, and was followed a few years later by CBS’s blockbuster hit, “Survivor.” Since then, the genre has proliferated faster than mice in a corncrib.

Foy’s move to the West Coast, coming just after he got his degree in radio and television from Temple, coincided with that explosion. He got some early production experience on shows that included a Grammy Awards telecast, then joined the Amsterdam-based Endemol Entertainment, which created the hit reality shows “Fear Factor” and “Big Brother.”

He later partnered with a couple of friends to create 3 Ball Productions, which produced “Biggest Loser” and “Breaking Bonaduce,” among others, then split away again to launch Tijuana Entertainment, whose credits include “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” for MTV and “Strange Days with Bob Saget” on A&E.

“I went to L.A. just to get into something,” Foy said. “I figured you have to be where the jobs are. As the [reality] genre really got started, it just became kind of a natural evolution for me.”

Foy knows that reality shows have no end of detractors, who sometimes proclaim them the death of quality television and appealing to the worst in human character.

As a prime example, they often point to the show “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” in which Berks County residents Jon and Kate Gosselin, parents of sextuplets born at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, became notorious tabloid celebrities and later divorced.

All while the cameras rolled.

In an article often quoted by reality haters, Entertainment Weekly magazine once noted, “Do we watch reality television for precious insight into the human condition? Please. We watch for those awkward scenes that make us feel a smidge better about our little unfilmed lives.”

There’s no question we do watch, even some of us who pretend to be above the fray.

A poll in summer 2010 by the digital recording company TiVo found that 40 percent of Americans television viewers said they were growing tired of reality shows.

Yet the same week that poll came out, 15 of the top 20 television shows were of the reality persuasion, including “America’s Got Talent,” “Big Brother,” “The Bachelorette” and “So You Think You Can Dance.”

And dozens of reality “stars,” from “Jersey Shore’s” Snooki to Spencer Pratt of “The Hills,” have given rise to new lingo such as “Z-list celebrities” and “nonebrities.” It’s lately become a way for potential presidential candidates such as Donald Trump (“The Apprentice”) and Sarah Palin (“Sarah Palin’s Alaska”) to mix politics and entertainment in a whole new way.

Truth is, many of us claim to hate reality TV shows while secretly watching one or two we love. “American Idol”? Overblown twaddle! But excuse me while I set the DVR to record “Confessions: Animal Hoarding.” And when’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on?

“People look down their nose at it,” Foy said, “but there are plenty of good sitcoms and plenty of crappy sitcoms. Just because a show is quote-unquote real, it comes in for a little more criticism, but there’s good and bad in every genre.”

Even staid PBS, which prides itself on running high-quality “reality shows” such as “Nova” and “Nature,” strayed perilously close to “Big Brother” turf in 2002 with “Frontier House,” an educational reality show in which modern families lived like 19th-century homesteaders.

What might be becoming more difficult in the world of reality television, Foy believes, is creating broad-based national hits like “Idol,” “The Amazing Race,” “Survivor” and “The Apprentice.”

“I think the genre will continue to fracture out,” Foy said. “Nowadays, each network has their own kind of audience they are aiming at. That’s why the documentary style shows seem to be catching on. Tattoo parlors, pawnshops, that sort of thing.”

People often equate reality shows with cheap production values, and that’s often true. No pricey writers, no superstar actors pulling down $1 million per episode. But “Idol,” with its nationwide auditioning process, and the globe-trotting “Amazing Race” are not inexpensive shows to make. That’s another force, along with a proliferation of channels on cable and satellite, driving reality TV toward a model that features less-expensive shows aiming at a specific — read: relatively small — audience.

And that’s the primary market Foy wants ShootersTV to tap with its new products. As the industry decentralizes, he said, there’s no longer a need to be based in the traditional media capitals of Los Angeles and New York. Philadelphia will work just fine.

“It’s amazing how many talented people there are right here,” Foy said. “Really, technology has made it possible to do this anywhere.”

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